Managing director Joost de Man of Vers aan Tafel (Fresh to Table) Meal Service:

“With Vers aan Tafel Meal Service, we operate in a special market. We are dealing with a very special target group, which you cannot always reach through online channels. The trick is to get in touch with them in familiar ways through the various marketing and communication channels. We have been doing this well in recent years. We now have a pretty good idea of how to reach elderly people living independently at home.

I would describe the cooperation with Frigo Group as flexible and collaborative. To illustrate: a few years ago, just before Christmas, we took over an organisation in the south of the country. I called the Frigo Group on Friday afternoon, two days before Christmas, saying that 3,000 meals had to be delivered on Monday in the south of the country, order-picked and all. Illustrative of our partnership, because that’s how I see it, was the Frigo Group’s response: we’ll take care of it. Not ‘oy’, ‘difficult’, ‘expensive’, ‘almost Christmas’ and ‘too late’, but: we’ll sort it out. And it was arranged, those 3,000 new customers in the south of the country all had a tasty and healthy Fresh to Table meal in their homes on Monday.

Through such experiences, I dare say there is great mutual trust. And we will need that if we are going to realise our growth ambitions in the coming years. The momentum is there: the number of over-65s and over-80s is growing fast and the policy is to let them live independently at home for as long as possible. This cannot be done without good, varied and healthy food. The latter is particularly important: many elderly people do not eat a varied enough diet, eat too little or eat unhealthily, for instance because they take in too much salt and/or too little protein. One of our USPs is that we pay a lot of attention to this, by involving dieticians and doctors in the composition of our meals, among other things. To our range, which already consisted of 170 frozen meals, soups and desserts, we recently added ten protein-enriched snacks. These help older people to maintain their muscle mass and strength and stay fit and vital for longer.

Like the quality, the healthiness of our freshly frozen meals is a major strength of Fresh to Table which, I am convinced, will lead to further growth in the coming years. In doing so, it is reassuring to know that storage and transport are in the trusted hands of the Frigo Group.”